This post appeared in a previous blog and is here for posterity’s sake.

The boat.HSE – a model.
After five or so years, one should really get over loss, but sometimes the first cut is the deepest; I am talking, of course, of the first project I had ever secured and then lost due to a variety of reasons. The long process of wooing a client and then securing the project for the University of Cincinnati’s Women Rowing Team, was very much like a dance. Then growing the project from a simple “pole barn” to a full design project, with site selection, master planning, and then design was an education itself; learning how to survive while the university bureaucracy ground down, securing payment for two poor architecture students, was a completely different education.
So it comes great sadness that my baby, which I still have feelings of ownership, is now at the center of Title IX legal proceedings. Members of the women’s rowing team are accusing the university of not equally supporting women’s athletics. I wish I could be surprised it would come to this, but the bureaucracy at a major university is amazingly difficult to deal with. On the mater of equality, I have no way to judge, being away from the project nigh on five years.
Even so, the university was recently trumpeting a new boathouse which was given $1 million seed money for my – and my fellow designer’s – boathouse design.
Someday (and probably soon) I will have to sit down and write all of this out, it would be an excellent case study for beginning designers and business people.
Later
Here’ a Cincinnati Enquirer about the suit:

Monday, the team filed suit against the university, saying UC has spent millions on men’s sports while not providing the women’s rowing team so much as a boathouse. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court, alleges that UC is in violation of Title IX laws, which prohibit gender discrimination in educational programs that receive federal assistance.
…
A bit of history: Originally, the university had plans to build a $3 million boathouse in Wilder, Ky., on the banks of the Licking River. Construction was slated to begin in February 2004 and end eight months later. A donor pledged $1 million to the project. But the boathouse ran into snags for both design and financial reasons, UC spokesman Greg Hand said. Replacement sites or designs have not materialized.

Even later…
Well, who though the News Record was good for nothing::

Perhaps the largest issue in the lawsuit is a proposed boathouse in Wilder, Ky., which was never built.
In December 2000, UC Board of Trustee member Candace Kendle gave $1,032,281, the largest single amount donated, to the construction of the new boathouse UC promised to build, according documents obtained by the The News Record.

As they say in DC, you are not off the track.